There are generally four main types of casing designs for portable devices such as mobile phones. The four main types of casing designs are candy bar, flip, slider and swivel designs.
Candy bar phones only have one usage configuration compared to, for instance, flip phones, which have two configurations, a flipped configuration and a non-flipping configuration. Candy bar phones are not designed for hands free viewing of the screen. If one wishes to view the screen without holding the phone in his/her hands, the phone needs to lie flat and face up on a surface or lean against an object and be positioned at an angle facing the user.
With regard to slider phones, where a top part of the phone is capable of sliding over a bottom part of the phone, it has been observed that the hinge mechanisms involved are restricted to at most two dimensional movements along the main plane of the phone. There has so far been little or no innovation on such hinge mechanisms to allow other types of movements to enable more usage configurations. Similarly, slider phones are not designed for hands free viewing of the screen. If one wishes to view the screen without holding a slider phone in his/her hands, the phone needs to lie flat and face up on a surface or lean against an object and be positioned at an angle facing the user.
With regard to flip phones, where a top part of the phone is pivotable about a bottom part of the phone, an observation is that the main display is typically accessible only by flipping the phone open in a portrait configuration (i.e. with the major length of the screen being vertical). Use of flip phones may be inconvenient in the sense that the main display is not located on the front side of the phone for viewing and the user needs to flip the phone open to view the main display.
As for swivel phones, where a top part of the phone can be swiveled about an axis normal to the planar surface of a bottom part of the phone, some users find it awkward to swivel the phone, the usage of other phone designs appear to be more direct and intuitive.
A need therefore exists to provide a hinge mechanism for a portable device that addresses at least one of the above-mentioned problems.